


truths both stark and universal

by Ericine



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Exhaustion, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Honesty, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Miscommunication, Motherhood, Romance, Science, Sleepover Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 17:10:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3736927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ericine/pseuds/Ericine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In their mutual desires to protect, they gravitate toward each other. It's only a matter of time before they meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	truths both stark and universal

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response for a greater demand for my Sam/Vala stories! Set before release.
> 
> Trigger warning for slight discussions on drinking and lost children (namely, Adria).

Sam tries to put her wine glass on the table beside her and lie back on Vala’s bed in one motion, and it doesn’t exactly work.

Vala chuckles, catching Sam’s glass right before it risks tipping over the edge of the table. “Perhaps I should get you a straw.” 

“I’m just tired,” murmurs Sam. She doesn’t use the word “jetlag” anymore. A trip to a different hemisphere doesn’t compare to leaving one side of the galaxy in the middle of the night and emerging in another just past lunchtime when she’s slept a total of 15 hours in the past five and a half days.

Daniel and Cam are staying at the mountain too—they never drive in this state. Sam and Daniel never did—even back when it didn’t go up against regulations. Vala had asked Sam for a night (day?) cap, and Sam had obliged—what’s another hour without sleep? 

Also, she’s worried about Vala. There were a lot of children on that planet. Adria may not be a threat anymore, but she’s always present to Vala. Sam’s mind flickers to Cassie. Cassie’s fine, in school now, but Sam promises herself she’ll call her anyway when she’s capable of more than a couple broken sentences.

Vala smiles, runs a hand through Sam’s hair. It’s a little longer now but still in the stage between styles where it looks hopelessly shaggy. Vala takes one of her signature hair clips out of her hair and pins it out of Sam’s face. Sam groans in protest.

“No one’s going to see you,” says Vala. “It’s just me.” She’s still sitting up somehow, cross-legged, close to Sam. If Sam turns her cheek, she can rub her face into Vala’s thigh. “Feels better, though, doesn’t it?”

Sam takes a deep breath and decides speaking takes too much effort. She nods.

Vala keeps her hand in Sam’s hair. “Do you ever wish you could actually get drunk?” she asks. At Sam’s silence, she continues. “You forget I have the naquadah too. We’re blood sisters.”

Sam laughs a little at that. “It processes the alcohol too quickly,” says Sam. “No one knows.” It was Vala’s turn to be silent. “I mean, the team knows how it metabolizes, of course, but I don’t think they’ve ever made the connection. Or if they have, they’re too kind to say something.”

“So what do you do when you go out with them?” Vala asks.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” laughs Sam, “but we’re not a bunch of heavy drinkers.”

“I wouldn’t have liked it,” says Vala. “Hinders you too much, in my experience. Makes you blunt. Dull.”

“Like now?” asks Sam, smiling faintly. Vala puts down her glass and lies down next to her.

“I’m never dull.”

“You’re plenty blunt,” says Sam, and Vala laughs at that. “I don’t miss drinking—when would I have the time?”

“But,” prompts Vala. 

“I wish I’d known the last time was the last time. For the hell of it.”

“You would have had more?” asks Vala.

“No,” says Sam, “but I would have had something other than beer. Everyone on base loves their beer. It always made me feel full. I could never have a lot. A nice whiskey, maybe. Or a Long Island.” She rolls her eyes to herself. "It's stupid."

“I’ve never been drunk,” says Vala. Sam turns to her, and with her eyes half-shut, Sam thinks that Vala’s hair looks a lot like space—dark with scatterings of stars.

“Really?” 

“When Qetesh came, I hadn’t before. We had wine sometimes at dinner, but—” Vala shrugs. 

“I think sometimes I forget how young you must have been.” Sam does turn her head then, her nose bumping into Vala’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asks. 

It’s a question they don’t ask anymore—any of them at the SGC. It’s redundant, because they all know the answer, and they’re too polite to mention it. They’re tired, though, and the shimmering clips in Vala’s hair look like stars, and Vala’s been resting her hand lightly on Sam’s hip ever since she laid down, so maybe that’s enough barriers down to be honest, the type that comes without omission. 

It’s the kind of honest Sam hasn’t had in her life in a while, at least until Vala sailed into it. 

Still, Vala’s brow furrows at that—Sam can see that even through half-closed eyes—and she doesn’t want to see it. The smallest bit of guilt bites at her, and she knows she’ll feel wrung-out and raw tomorrow, the way the she did in the morning after telling all her sleepover secrets in the middle of the night in middle school. She wonders how long honesty has had the power to make her feel this way. The realization washes over her but doesn’t stick, recognition of a dream that she’s lost while waking. 

“As much as you are,” replies Vala, which Sam thinks has to be a lie. She’s thinking that maybe she just didn’t have the right to ask the question when Vala sits up, pulls off her tank top, and lies back down so quickly that Sam’s still processing the cold air on her face where Vala’s shoulder used to be.

She’s wearing a bra, a nice one, pink and black lace, the kind that she never would have let Vala wear on a mission, and it amuses Sam to think that Vala wears that in her spare time, that she likes it.

“Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and forget about it—parts of it, all of it. Then, I look in the mirror, or I change, or we go to a planet and I hold a child that would have been about her age if she’d been—I don’t know,” says Vala. She takes Sam’s hand and places it on her stomach. “Then I remember.”

Sam sits up and looks. The stretch marks are small but many, a series of streaks against a pale field, some kind of nebula.

“I’m sorry,” murmurs Sam.

“I know,” says Vala, and it’s not irritated, just honest. She reaches for her shirt.

“No,” says Sam, and Vala raises an eyebrow at that. Sam’s face warms. “I mean, it’s your room. I’ll go. I’m crashing anyway.”

“Stay,” says Vala, putting the shirt aside. “Tell them I had a nightmare. Tell them I—tied you up, I don’t know.”

“We hang out all the time,” says Sam with a dismissive shrug. She meets Vala’s eyes and lies back down because gravity appears to be sending her in that direction anyway (gravity always wins—one can only delay the inevitable) and she finds, suddenly, that it’s too hard to look at Vala. Her face is too frank all of a sudden.

Sam wonders when Vala learned how to do that, to speak SG-1’s language. She wonders if Vala’s known how to do it all along but has just decided to start communicating that way now, right here in her bedroom while she, like Sam, fights the urge to sleep.

Slowly, much too slowly, like she thinks Sam’s going to leave anyway, Vala rolls over, until Sam’s arm meets Vala’s skin, collarbone to storm-cloud stomach.

“Vala,” murmurs Sam, even as she turns herself, a conscious decision, to drape her arm around Vala. She’s always surprised at how small Vala is, how small but solid she is, like her frame hides her strength the way Vala can hide everything from a person until she’s ready to make herself known.

Vala hums, a sound that somehow still holds the same humor with which Vala seems to punctuate everything, a sound that Vala seems to still be making as they move closer, closer (an object in motion will stay in motion), and their lips meet.

It’s not much a kiss. It would barely qualify by high school standards—closed-lipped, but Vala sighs into it anyway, and Sam finds herself cupping the back of Vala’s head (so much hair), her cheek.

It’s a mistake.

Vala’s leaning into Sam when she pulls back.

“I’m sorry!” Sam breathes, rolling away, staring back up at the ceiling. She shivers at the sudden lack of warmth.

How could she have done that? After everything else Vala’s been through, after everything Vala’s revealed to her tonight (Today? Sam doesn’t even know what time it is. Time’s stopped in this room). 

“I’m sorry,” says Sam again, because she’s stuck—moving toward or away from Vala are both moves that could make things worse (an object at rest will stay at rest). She stares at the ceiling, hoping that wordless thing Vala does is going to be enough to decipher what she means, because she _can’t_ , can’t tell her ( _I want you but not in the way you’ve been wanted before. Not unless you’re ready. Please understand_ ).

She waits for Vala to speak (time is relative).

“No,” Vala says slowly, leaning up and over Sam, trying to find her eyes, which are fixated on the ceiling. “Don’t be sorry. Then I’d have to be sorry too, and that just cancels itself out.”

“I can go.”

“You can.”

Neither of them move.

“Is it that you think they’d be mad?” Vala asks, finally, and Sam can tell she’s struggling for words, though she doesn’t understand why. Vala’s never been at a loss of words before.

“What?” 

Vala waves her hands in the air. “Them. The other people around here. Because—we—I don’t even know.”

Sam does meet her eyes, then, because she’s completely out of depth. “What? No. I just—I mean—you. Are you okay? I don’t want to—” She trails off because Vala’s giving her that look of unmasked confusion again. 

“Then you—don’t want this. You can say so. I mean, I completely understand. I shouldn’t have.”

“You shouldn’t—no, _I_ shouldn’t.” Sam puts her hands over her face. “Oh my God. I’m incapable of speech. Vala, I don’t want to take advantage of you. I’ve never wanted anything but for you to feel safe—” She stops, because Vala’s pulling her hands away from her face. Why is this so hard to articulate? “Vala,” she whispers again, because that’s apparently the universal call for help now.

“Samantha,” says Vala, call-and-response, and there’s so much warmth in her name, her full name, and something pulls inside Sam at the realization that she hasn’t felt that in a while. She’s starved for it. “You’re not taking advantage.” Vala reaches into Sam’s hair and redoes the clip. “If anything, it was the other way around.”

“Me?” asks Sam. The realization rises in her, a bubble to the stop of a dense liquid, and suddenly, she feels so light.

They’ve both been going about this so wrong.

“Vala!” she laughs. 

Vala pouts. “What? From what I understand, you’ve spent the last ten years dodging suitors left and right. I just thought—you know, after you came back, you needed time to yourself.” 

“It’s been two years.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know how much time is enough? Everyone’s so secretive around here—I never know what to say or _do_ —”

“ _Vala_.”

Vala’s eyes narrow, but there’s a familiar spark behind them. “ _Samantha_.” She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “You can’t blame me. You’re living here under all these regulations, none of which I understand, even when they’re explained to me.”

Sam slides back over to Vala and touches her cheek ( _lets herself_ touch Vala’s cheek, lets her hand linger this time). “You think after everything we’ve been through, after everything we’ve seen, regulations were going to be the thing that got in the way? I just wanted you to be okay with—whatever this is. I just want you to feel at home.”

Sam doesn’t know how to respond to the look on Vala’s face after she says _that_ , but it’s a look that moves her to kiss her again, so she does. Properly, this time—hands in Vala’s hair, Vala warm against her chest. She doesn’t know how long it lasts (time is relative), but she pulls back, finally.

“Come back,” says Vala, but her eyes are half closed, and she pulls her pillow a little closer to her.

Sam smiles. “I’m right here.” She pulls the blanket up from the end of the bed and pulls it over the both of them (Vala wraps her arms around her and they just fit, fall together that way). “We have time.”

When Sam wakes up, she and Vala have rolled to the opposite ends of the bed, and her pillow’s fallen to the floor. She feels light, open, without regret. She doesn't feel raw at all.


End file.
